by Linda Ladd
“Yes, yes, I will. I promise.”
Novak and Jenn exchanged skeptical glances. This girl had proven herself a damn liar. It would be hard to believe anything that came out of her mouth. She had obviously told a ton of lies in her young life. Maybe she’d had to. Maybe she just liked to. Maybe she was a pathological liar and got off on it.
“I don’t know, Marisol. I’m pretty damn sick and tired of asking you questions and finding out later that all your answers were lies. I saved your skin, several times now, and you still won’t come clean with me.”
Marisol had been sitting there working herself up to some serious and tearful outrage. “I’ve been too frightened to! Don’t you understand how terrifying all this has been for me? I’ve been through a lot of bad stuff. I don’t know you, so I’m afraid of you. And her! I don’t like her at all. She’s mean. I don’t like this place. I don’t like being locked in that room and treated like a prisoner.”
“Yeah? Well, I don’t like your whining or anything else you’ve pulled on me.”
Marisol fell hastily into a full-fledged sulk then and stared down at her empty plate.
“Okay, take off your shorts.” That was Jenn.
Marisol looked genuinely shocked. “No! Why?”
“Because we know that Marisol Ruiz has a tattoo. Do you have a tattoo?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Yes, of course, I do. But just one. It’s down here.” She pointed vaguely to a spot below her waist.
“What kind of tat?” Novak asked her.
“A little butterfly.”
“What color?”
“Blue. Why?”
“Okay, pull down your pants,” Jenn said. “I want to see it for myself.”
“No way. You can’t make me undress.”
“Wanna bet?”
Marisol looked at both of them. “Okay, but I don’t think it’s right for you to make me do this. It’s probably illegal and stuff.”
Neither of them said anything, too disgusted with her for words. They waited.
The girl turned her back to Novak and pulled down the front waistband of her shorts. Jenn examined the tattoo and then nodded at Novak. So she was Marisol Ruiz. Good, at least now they knew that much, otherwise it would be one hell of a coincidence. Novak was more interested in everything else.
“How did you get on that boat? Orion’s Trident?”
Marisol looked as if her brain was working on overdrive now, frantically assessing which lies would work and which would not. Trying to recall what she’d said before. That was the trouble with liars. They had to have a hell of a good memory. Novak was well acquainted with the signs of deceit, and Marisol was displaying all of them.
“It’s time now for you to tell the truth, kid. If you don’t trust our motives now, you never will. We might as well drop you off at a police station and let them drive you straight home to Papi.”
Jenn stood up and moved around behind the girl. She put both hands on the girl’s shoulders. She pressed her down in the chair. Mild intimidation. It usually worked. It did this time, too. Marisol’s big dark eyes flashed in panic. “Please don’t hurt me. I can’t stand pain. I can’t. It makes me throw up.”
More tears. Tears that looked damn real. Wet to the touch, but lots of actresses cried on cue, and apparently so did little Marisol Ruiz. But she seemed to know about pain and what it did to her. Still, Novak was tired, and tired of her, and tired of wasting time.
“Who’s the Mayan? What’s he want with you? The truth now, all of it.”
Marisol started sobbing, loud and sloppy enough to stop up her nose and make it run. She coughed, poor little thing. “He works for Papi. He kills people for Papi. Like I said before.”
Novak believed that to be true. “You’ve already told us that. So he’s your father’s own personal assassin?”
“I guess so. I don’t know him very well. I just saw him sometimes in my house. He’s creepy and stuff. Papi didn’t like me to be around him. They always went off alone in Papi’s private office and talked.”
“Do you really think your father would order a guy to hunt you down and murder you in cold blood?”
“Sí, he would do that! I’m telling you the truth. He doesn’t care about me, not anymore. He doesn’t care about anybody. He doesn’t love me or my mama. He beats her up. And he ordered the Mayan to kill my brother, too.”
Okay, lie one and lie two, coming in fast and furious now. This girl just didn’t learn. He decided to let her continue. See if anything truthful came out of her mouth. “Why did he put a hit on your brother?”
“Because Francisco tried to get away from him. He tried to escape and flee up to the United States, to Texas, to Houston, but he didn’t make it. So the Mayan caught him and killed him. He brought his scalp home to Mama and Mama fainted when she saw it …”
Novak just shook his head. She was not only a bald-faced liar, she was a damn imaginative one, too. He wondered if she sat around all day thinking up emergency sob stories. “What’s the Mayan’s real name?”
“I don’t know,” she cried out, with a great display of pseudo hysteria now, sobbing, phony tears streaming down her cheeks. “Papi just calls him the Mayan. Like I told you already. He’s scary. He’s killed so many people, so many. Hundreds, I bet. Ever since I was a little girl, I knew what he did. He’s got all these rituals that I heard Papi talking about. He kills people with some kind of special knife. One made out of green obsidian or something. He got it down in Guatemala.”
Okay, now she was throwing in some tidbits of truth to make the story sound better. “Why did he need a special knife?”
“Papi said it was so sharp it could split a single hair. He told me it was a knife that the ancient Mayans used for human sacrifices. To cut out people’s hearts. A real one, an artifact that somebody dug up in an archaeology excavation. Papi said he gave it to him because the Mayan is descended from those priests.”
“Then why is he not cutting out hearts now? Why did he scalp those men?”
Marisol looked trapped by the question. This time it took a while for her to come up with the right lie. She dropped the poor little mistreated girl routine and took on a whole different persona. Now she seemed quite calm and coolheaded. “Okay, I’ll tell you everything. I guess I can trust you.”
“Go right ahead. We’re listening.”
“I told you the truth about Diego and the kidnapping. What else do you want to know?”
“How is the Mayan tracking us?”
“I don’t know that. I swear. I’d tell you if I knew. Do you think I want him to get me? We thought we were safe out there in the ocean, but he sneaked aboard somehow. We didn’t hear him, we didn’t see him coming. He was just there all of a sudden. You saw him shoot Diego. You saw him attack me. He left me for dead in the ocean. You know all of this already. You had to save me.”
“It’s the same guy, the one out on the boat and the one following you? This Mayan guy?” asked Jenn.
Marisol looked down, fearful again. “It was him. I think he thought I would drown and be gone forever. But now he knows I’m alive, and he’s coming to finish me off. I guess Papi told him to make sure I was dead.” She wiped away a new tear. All serious now. “He’ll find us and he’ll kill me, then he’ll kill you and cut off the tops of our heads like he did all those men on the beach. We’ll all be dead soon.”
Despite his misgivings, Novak was beginning to believe a lot of what she was saying. The tat itself was pretty good proof. But not infallible. The rest of her story was still suspect. But at least they knew who she was and why she was being stalked.
“We know you ran off once and disappeared for six months. Where’d you go?”
“I went to Florida and enrolled at the University of Miami. I wanted to go to school in America. Papi wouldn’t let me. I like the United States, where everybody is free to do what they want. Where nobody knew me and wanted to kidnap me.”
Novak took over the questioning. “What else can
you tell us about the Mayan?”
“He kills for pleasure, I guess. Papi said he cuts out hearts and keeps them in special little black clay pots that he makes himself.” She gave a little involuntary shiver.
Novak leaned back in his chair. “This Mayan guy found us way too fast. Zeroed right in on us. You’ve got to have an idea how he’s doing it.”
“I don’t know. I keep telling you, I don’t know. He’s just good at finding people, I guess. I don’t know him. I just know what Papi told me. I never talked to the Mayan or anything. I’ve always been afraid of him. He crept around our house when I was little, but Papi treated him like a member of our family. He said he was his adopted son.”
“Why are you lying about your mother? We know she died the day you were born.”
Marisol’s face was easy to read. Uh-oh, busted. “I don’t know why. I just did.”
Novak blew out a frustrated breath. This girl could drive a man crazy. She needed serious psychological help. “Okay, that’s enough for tonight. I’m taking you back to the hold, and I want you to get some sleep. Got that? Wash up, put on some clean clothes, and try to relax. Don’t try to escape, or he’ll probably find you and murder you. If you pull something stupid, I’m not coming after you again. No more. I’ll let him have you.” He stopped and let that sink in. Looked like it might have this time. “Your best chance to stay alive is right here with us. Now, I want you to think about everything that’s gone down. Tomorrow, you need to tell us everything you can remember about this killer. Especially how he tracks his victims. Try to recall everything you’ve heard about him. Because I want him, and I’m going to get him. Think long and hard. And no more lies. If I catch you in another lie, I’m going to dump you down the street at the beach and you can find your own way home, and good luck with that.”
Marisol looked subdued. No more tears, no more arguments. Maybe she’d seen the light. He hoped to God she had. But he wouldn’t bet on it. Jenn led the girl back to the hold and locked her in. Novak just sat there alone in the kitchen and tried to sort through what Jenn had uncovered and what Marisol had told them. Then he attempted to separate fact from fiction. It wasn’t easy.
Chapter Twelve
While Jenn was securing Marisol for the night, Novak wandered over to the fridge and took out a couple of cold beers. Then he went exploring. Most of Jenn’s safe houses were similar in setup. She had housed him in Belize at her own place on a private beach, but during his time with her, they had made several trips up into Mexico for maintenance and restocking of her covert sites. He had been to this very house once before for several days, remembered it well. It had a good floor plan that could meet any possible emergency or exigency. The architecture of her houses was usually different, but the hidey-holes and the escape hatches were not. He found the hidden door in the hallway and punched in the right code, holding the two icy bottles between his fingers as he climbed the steep, narrow steps that led up to the roof.
At the top of the stairs, he unlocked another heavy steel door and stepped out onto a private rooftop garden. Tall white lattice panels were erected all the way around, covered with more lush bougainvillea vines. More flowering plants were everywhere, of every type and hue, alongside palms and orange trees in giant pots. A glass-topped outdoor table with an orange market umbrella sat in the middle, strings of tiny solar lights attached under it. And there was the big double-wide hammock, an amenity that he and Jenn had used often and well while in the house, bodies entwined, gazing at the stars.
Novak placed the bottles down on the table and walked across to the east side that faced the ocean. Hinged doors in the lattice panels were always closed but could stand open to the breezes at night. He pulled them open and gazed out over the sea, blurry in the fading light, but gray and wild and restless, stretching all the way east to Africa. Along the wide beach was a pedestrian boardwalk lit by a long line of lampposts that glowed like dinner tapers in the twilight. He wished he were out there in that inky dark sea. He wished he were still on his boat. He wished it wasn’t sitting on the bottom of that cove. He missed it. He missed the swell of the waves under his feet. And that’s what he was going to do, as soon as he got himself out of this god-awful mess he was in. Raise the Sweet Sarah and have her refitted.
The roof was a pleasant spot, cooled by soft ocean breezes, and a place where Novak knew Jenn spent her idle time. The safe house in which he’d lived for a time with Jenn also had a roof garden. Maybe different types of flowers, different furniture, different view, but basically the same. Both had nifty hidden retractable escape ladders that would get her and her asset down to the garage if the house was stormed from the front. Now, in the evening, the sea wind felt cool against his skin and the smell of the sea and Jenn’s roses took over his senses.
“This always was your favorite spot, Novak. Especially at night.”
Jenn was standing in the door, watching him. He sat down on the chaise longue and stretched out full length. It wasn’t quite long enough for his legs. “Yeah. Fresh air and open spaces.”
“Tell me about it. Not a man to be tied down.”
Their gazes held, but not for long. Novak knew what she wanted to talk about so he changed the subject. “You still keep the motorcycles out there?”
Jenn sat down on the chair beside him. She leaned back and crossed those long, shapely bare legs of hers. She looked damn good doing it. Novak twisted the top off a beer and handed it to her. “Yes, I’ve still got them. Just two at the moment. My last asset took off on the small Suzuki. But the big Harley that you like so much? It’s still here. They’re all gassed up and ready to roll. Why? You taking off already?”
“I need to borrow one, the Harley, I guess. And I’m going to have to ask you for another big favor. Sorry.”
“Okay, nothing I didn’t expect. It’s gonna get as dicey as ever with you back in the picture.”
“You remember that resort area up the coast from Chetumal? The one off by itself with a couple of nice hotels? Near where the American cruise ships dock and their passengers come ashore to swim and have beach parties?”
Jenn gave him a look. “What do you think? That’s where I picked you up for extraction. You were lying out there on the sand, burning up with fever and a gunshot in the thigh. You looked half dead, Novak.”
“Yes, I was half dead. Thanks again for saving my life.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Look, I’ve been sitting here thinking about things and trying to second-guess this guy. He’s onto us. We’ve already seen him here in the city. Pretty sure who he is now. Don’t know why he’s here, except that he wants that girl downstairs in the worst way. But he’s coming at us and he’s coming hard. Those hotels up there where you picked me up? I think that’s where he’ll put in. I think he’s got some kind of big fast boat and that’s how he got here so quickly.”
“Why up there?”
“Because that’s the place I picked for extraction. That’s where I’d go if I were him. He’s a pro. He’ll know his boat won’t be noticed there like it would be inside the city center. It’s an inlet off the ocean, and I remember there’s a ton of marinas where he could tie up and never be noticed. I think he’s already docked there and rented a car at one of those hotels and found a way to track us. Maybe he’s got satellite surveillance connections somewhere, somebody important helping him. Maybe even the Mexican government is in on this somehow. I don’t know. I just know he shows up everywhere we go.”
“I can see how he’d rather dock up there,” Jenn said. “That strip runs a good three or four miles along the coast. Very Americanized. Lots of tourists, lots of bars and nightclubs and nightlife. Lots of noise and excitement. Crowded. Not many locals. So what do you have in mind?”
“I want you to go up there with me, pick a hotel, and get me a suite with at least two bedrooms. Has to have a good ocean view and a balcony. Top floor, if possible. Those marinas are spread out right in front of the hotels, all across the bay, if I
recall. I want to set up surveillance. See if I can spot him. He’s docked up there, I can feel it. Probably laying low after missing us today, and looking to locate us again. I’d book the room myself, but I’d stand out. People have a tendency to remember me because of my size. I don’t want anybody to remember me. He’s going to inquire around about me.”
“Oh, you’re memorable all right, Novak. But you’re just guessing, right? You’re not sure he’s up there?”
Novak tipped the bottle up, took a sip. He focused his gaze out on the dark horizon. “Maybe he is. Maybe not. It’s just a gut feeling, but I trust my gut, always have. This guy, this Mayan? Pretty sure now that he likes to travel by water. That’s how he got into that pirate camp where we were being held. Paddled in with that canoe and spent the evening slitting the throats of every single man and woman he laid eyes on. I stopped counting corpses and concentrated on getting the hell out of there. We were damn lucky we didn’t end up dead that night. If he’d found us when we were chained up in that hut, he would’ve finished us off.”
Leaning back in her chair, Jenn got quiet. She just stared out over the ocean for a while. “You have always been lucky, Will. A dozen people plus dead, and you didn’t hear any of it go down?”
“I heard nothing. Not until that Liu woman started screaming like you wouldn’t believe. Awful, agonized shrieks that echoed through the jungle, shrill enough to raise the hair on my arms. So we moved faster and made it to the beach. That’s where I saw the bodies scattered around, his fresh kills. All were young men, all armed, all guards at their posts. Yet he managed to get them, one at a time, slit their gullets and slice off their hair. The scalping thing doesn’t fit, either. I can’t figure why he’d take the time to do that. No need, as far as I can figure. Seemed like overkill, and too theatrical for a professional like he’s supposed to be.”
“Only you can get yourself into this kind of thing, Novak.” Jenn sighed and took a drink.
Night was falling rapidly now. He could hear a bird squawking somewhere off behind them. Probably a big macaw, caged up and wishing it wasn’t. He listened to the soft lull of the tide, washing up on the sand, receding into the whole again. The smell of the sea made him long to be back on the ocean again.